Où va le monde ? Free market or forced market

The book opposes and weaves together two different interpretations of the recent turbulences in global and local politics and tries to answer the question whether or not geopolitics are taking their revenge over geoeconomics after a few decades of overall positive globalization and European integration.

On the one side a classical westphalian reading according to which globalisation has accentuated passions, tensions and conflicts, thus leading to the present populist dangerous surge towards isolationism and conflict (Gnesotto, the geopolitician). On the other side, a recognition that recent developments have not gone in the right direction, but that they are more a deviation than a change of course, as they are shaped by formidable transformations of capitalism in technology, economic systems and societies which could be harnessed to keep humanity on a “plus” curve (Lamy, the geo-economist).

In the first part (“Rien ne va plus”), we each outline our views. The second part (“sixteen variations on the world with two voices”) is a dialogue about main actors/regions (US, China, Africa, etc) and topics (migrations, energy, cyber, oceans, governance, etc). The last part (“Europe challenged”) is a one voice development about European integration as one of the possible tilting factors for the good, provided it rebalances its course with a stronger geopolitical engagement, which would among other conditions imply breaking the taboo of force.

All in all, what we try to analyse, and help the reader to understand, is the crucial nexus between economic integration and political integration (cf. Polanyi’s theory of “desembedding” economics and politics), a major component of the European dream as “a step towards the organization of tomorrow’s world” (Jean Monnet, one of the “founding fathers” of the 1950s).